Julie Tetel Andresen

Research Description

Julie Tetel (Andresen) writes in the field of linguistic historiography, focusing on French, German, and American theories of language from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries. She is the author of Linguistics in America 1769-1924: A Critical History (Routledge, 1990, paperback edition 1996). She is currently writing a manuscript entitled Observing Linguistics to be finished in 2004. She served for five years as the Director of the Duke Univeristy-University of Bucharest, Romania Faculty Exchange. Between 1985 and 1997 she published sixteen historical novels with mass-market publishers. In 1997 she founded her own publishing company, with two imprints: Generation Books (non-fiction) and Madeira Books (fiction).

Recent Publications

Phillip M. Carter.

(2014).

Languages of the World. An Introduction through Culture and Cognition.

(2013).

Linguistics and Evolution. A Developmental Systems Theory Approach.

Cambridge University Press.

Publication Description

For many years I taught a standard undergraduate Introduction to Linguistics, each year trying out one of the many textbooks currently available on the market. However, the longer I taught, the less happy I became with the fact that in a standard introductory textbook students encounter a body that is all cut up. In the chapter on speech production, the lungs, the larynx, and the oral and nasal cavities are discussed and represented, while the evolutionary adaptation of respiration to speech may or may not be addressed. The brain usually has its own chapter and is always pictured as a disembodied organ. The speech-gesture circuit has no place, and the hands only come into play if the topic is American Sign Language. The larynx often takes another turn on stage in the chapter on language acquisition given that babbling establishes connections between the larynx and the prefrontal cortex. The body finds itself in a context only in the chapter on pragmatics. And that chapter on pragmatics is usually at odds with the theoretical orientation of the chapter on syntax. So, by the end of an introductory course, students will have typically encountered a disembodied brain, a dismembered body mostly disembedded from context, along with a broken understanding of the very subject matter of linguistics. What’s more, the students might not even be aware of all these fractures.
The cause of these problems is easy to diagnose, in that the template for the standard introductory approach derives largely from a work that is eighty years old, namely Leonard Bloomfield’s Language of 1933. Although the book was masterful in its time, its organization has now outlived its usefulness. Surely, current introductory presentations regularly offer updated editions, incorporating recent findings from well-known subfields while sometimes adding new chapters, e.g. Language and Brain, Language and Evolution, Language and Society. However, while standard introductory presentations attempt to extend their reach by increasing the number of legitimate topics they survey, they end by doing too little in that they do not pause to retheorize and reorganize the whole.
It can be said that the problems in the textbooks are symptomatic of the problems in the discipline itself. Indeed, the philosopher John Searle has observed, “Often … we can find out more about what is going on in a culture by looking at undergraduate textbooks than by looking at the work of more prestigious thinkers. The textbooks are less clever at concealment” (Mind, Language and Society 1998:20). Searle most likely means that textbooks, in presenting material whose complexities must necessarily be sifted out for beginning students, more readily expose to experienced observers the bare bones of a discipline’s theoretical problems. Current introductory linguistics textbooks thus serve a useful, unintended purpose: they are reliable guides to the problems in the current state of the discipline’s theory and practice.
The impetus for writing LTD came to me some years ago when, a good third of the way through such a standard introductory text as An Introduction to Language, I encountered the unremarkable yet startling statement: “Actually, every utterance is some kind of speech act” (Fromkin, Rodman, Hyams 2003: 215). I was put in mind of Ferdinand de Saussure’s remark in Cours de linguistique générale that “it is often easier to discover a truth than to assign to it its proper place” (1959 [1915]: 68). The question immediately arose: What would an introductory linguistics textbook look like if the central insight of J.L. Austin’s speech act theory outlined in How To Do Things With Words (1962) were found not on page 215 but rather on page one?
So I began with one move: I acknowledged upfront that every utterance is some kind of speech act, meaning that from the beginning of time – whether considering the temporal axis in terms of the evolution of the species or in terms of the development of the individual – every utterance has occurred in a context, has issued forth from a speaking subject, and has had certain effects. It turned out that this one simple move required an overhaul of the whole. Simple is not necessarily easy.
First, I made a historiographic intervention by incorporating into the discipline an important tradition of thinking about our subject matter that has thus far fallen outside the mainstream. Notably, it is a tradition that developed in the wake of Darwin. It begins with the American psychologist William James and continues with thinkers from a variety of disciplines and national origins including, among others: the Russian semiotician V.N. Vološinov, the Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky, the British embryologist Conrad Waddington, the American developmental psychologist Susan Oyama, the Chilean neurobiologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela. These are researchers who all share a deep interest in the role of language in their disciplines and have accordingly reflected in interesting and useful ways on our subject matter. They all share three general tendencies: i) an orientation toward our subject matter that can be summarized, circularly, as languaging (Maturana and Varela’s notion) as an orienting behavior; ii) an allowance for the role and place of the individual that permits, at the same time, for a layered approach to our subject matter, one that engages with a wide variety of neurological, cultural and even ethical elements, even if the theorists were/are not interested in exploring those layers themselves; and iii) an appreciation of how bodies (for the most part human) behave in environments and engage in feedback loops with their environments and each other. These theorists foreground the highly circumstanced nature of whatever it is that they are studying, always with bodies embedded in environments and minds fully embodied.
Second, I imported a constructivist view of development that is one in which: i) environment and organism are causally linked; ii) organisms not only determine what aspects of the outside world are relevant to them by the peculiarities of their shape and metabolism but also actively construct, in the literal sense of the word, a world around themselves; and iii) organisms are in a constant process of altering their environment. Of course, no constructivist thinks that the term constructing means that organisms get to make up the world any way they want, for they are always constrained by the histories of the particular phylogenies to which they belong and by the features of the niches they inherit.
One of the most well developed constructivist approaches, broadly speaking, is Susan Oyama’s Developmental Systems Theory (DST). In the past thirty years DST has done the social and biological sciences the immense favor of eliminating the conceptual chaos behind the nature/nurture dichotomy along with the epistemological framework in which those bedeviled terms have currency. In linguistics, the dichotomy has made possible a concept of an inborn universal grammar hardware (so-called nature) that efficiently responds to the variable language software (so-called nurture) that every child encounters. The problem with the universal/variable // hardware/software model is that: i) developmental explanations are short-circuited, because a universal, inborn ability is not open to individual and variable development; ii) the abstract principles proposed for the grammar hardware have been difficult, if not to say impossible, to work out on the evolutionary axis; and iii) the differing uses of, for instance, the term nature – presence at birth, reliable timing, appearance without obvious learning, resistance to perturbation, evolutionary stability, distribution in a population – require distinctly different explanations. By way of brief critique, to explain what is present at birth requires an investigation of the factors involved in nine months of gestation, while determining the distribution of some trait in a population is not a developmental issue at all. Lumping them under the same rubric nature guarantees confusion. Given that Oyama has been the theorist who has most carefully untangled the conceptual chaos of the dichotomy, I chose DST as the theoretical fulcrum upon which I have balanced my accounts of evolution and development.
Third, I needed a more dynamic conception of our subject matter, and I found it in Maturana and Varela’s notion of languaging, which they use: i) to underscore the idea that each individual responds differently to conditions and is thus oriented differently in his or her cognitive domain in any given languaging situation; and ii) to foreground the intersubjective nature of the activity, such that languaging is not a personal possession. In LTD I expand upon Maturana and Varela and mean for languaging: iii) to scaffold cognition and to act as a means through which certain cognitive and conceptual developments are induced; iv) to span the troublesome distinction between the terms language and speech that some theorists maintain; v) to allow for multimodality, such that languaging is not deemed to be exclusively or even primarily an auditory activity; and vi) to include gesture as a dimension of its multimodality.
Lastly – and, then, of course to begin with – new organizing questions were required. Instead of asking: What is language? or What are the properties of our capacity for language? or What do we know when we know a language?, the questions became: How do living beings become languaging living beings? and How do we become the particular languaging living beings that we do? These questions necessarily shake up the traditional way linguist have conceptualized and then talk about the subject matter.
I now had three clear sections to map out: first, I had to open up the history of the discipline to include the above-mentioned researchers and then to clear the ground for the new theoretical framework; second, I had to make good on my claim that coherent evolutionary and developmental stories could be told in this new framework; and third, I had to follow through on the disciplinary consequences of what I had set forth, which involved another look at the discipline’s recent history and, most importantly, a call for the revision of introductory approaches.

(Spring, 2010).

Toward a history of American Linguistics.

Language

,

86

(1)

Washington DC:

Linguistics Society of America.

.

Publication Description

Toward a history of American linguistics. By E. F. K. KOERNER. (Routledge studies in the history
of linguistics.) London: Routledge, 2002. Pp. x, 315. ISBN 0415300606. $155
(Hb).
Reviewed by JULIE TETELANDRESEN, Duke University
E. F. K. (Konrad) Koerner is not only one of the premier linguistic historiographers in the
world, but he has also been one of the prime movers in helping to establish over the past thirtyfive
years an international community of scholars devoted to the practice of reading the historical
record of linguistics. Because the present volume gathers together mostly previously published
and now updated articles on one (but not the only) of K’s long-standing interests, those who are
interested either in the development of K’s thought or in the history of American linguistics will
be greatly satisfied. The subject matter ranges from ‘American structuralist linguistics and the
“problem of meaning” ’ (Ch. 5, first published in 1970) to ‘On the sources of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis’
(Ch. 3, first published in 1992), as well as to ‘William Labov and the origins of socio -
linguistics in America’ (Ch. 10, first published in 1991). K also covers quite a bit of territory in
between, meaning that much attention is given to the work and influence of Noam Chomsky. The
ten chapters are well selected and well organized to give readers a solid narrative of American linguistics
with an emphasis on the twentieth century. The volume’s coherence is further assured by
the addition of two chapters with no published predecessors, namely ‘On the rise and fall of generative
semantics’ (Ch. 6) and ‘On the origins of morphophonemics in American linguistics’ (Ch.
9), and by an appropriate introductory chapter, ‘The historiography of American linguistics’. The
last chapter, ‘In lieu of a conclusion: On the importance of the history of linguistics’, should be
read by all students of linguistics if only to learn where the concepts of ‘mark’ and ‘markedness’
and of ‘drag chain’ and ‘push chain’ come from (hint: not from Chomsky for the former pair and
not from Labov for the latter; see p. 289). In always gentle and gentlemanly terms, K encourages
linguists to know something about the history of their discipline in order to give their work depth
and perspective, not to mention accuracy.
K’s work can best be described as thorough and meticulous. When K is interested to investigate
Chomsky’s reading of Ferdinand de Saussure (Ch. 7, first published in 1994), he reads
everything, and I do mean everything, including the mimeographed version of Chomsky’s The
logical structure of linguistic theory (1955/1956) and his eighty-five-page contribution to the
Handbook of mathematical psychology entitled ‘Formal properties of grammars’ (1963), hardly a
commonplace reference. Similarly, in ‘The “Chomskyan revolution” and its historiography’ (Ch.
8, first published in 1983), K does not overlook Chomsky’s unpublished M.A. thesis, ‘Morphophonemics
of Modern Hebrew’ (1951; see n. 5 on p. 215 where K describes his failed attempt to
track down Chomsky’s undergraduate essay that Chomsky has evidently claimed to be the source
of his M.A. thesis). This is to point out that, for whatever subject he is working on, K comprehensively
reads the primary works both published and unpublished, tracks down sources, sifts
through footnotes, compares varying versions and editions of published work, reads the relevant
correspondence and other archival materials, and generally dots the i’s. One such (almost throwaway)
example is his remark to the effect that the mistaken date of 1915 given for Saussure’s
Cours by Leonard Bloomfield in his 1933 Language has served as the source for later, usually
North American, copyists (70–71).
K’s thoroughness and meticulousness serve him well in achieving the goal of his historiography,
which is, as he says at the beginning, a return to ‘(mere) history writing’, as opposed to the
more recent use of the term to mean a ‘principled accounting of past developments and activities’
(2). That is to say that, for K, the historian should stand at a certain distance from his subject,
should have no personal stake in the outcome of his research, and should be motivated ‘by a desire
to set the record straight’ (154). He identifies one of his guiding lights to be the nineteenthcentury
historian Leopold von Ranke, who is well known to have written that ‘history is neither
supposed to judge the past nor instruct the present on how to act for the benefit of the future, but
to depict how things really happened’ (155; with characteristic thoroughness K adds a footnote to
give the full context of Ranke’s quote in German and the proper reference). With regard to the last
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fifty years and the assessment of Chomsky’s place in the overall context of American linguistics,
K certainly has his work cut out for him, given the amount and kind of commentary about that
place that has come from within Chomsky’s own circle of admirers and supporters. K is more
than up to the job of pinning down who said what when and where and of providing linguists interested
in the historical record with a whistle-clean version of ‘what did X, Y, or Z know and
when did (t)he(y) know it?’. Beyond that, K lets the record speak for itself, deeming it ‘safer to let
the reader reach his own conclusions, rather than trying to impose a particular interpretation’
(153).
An interesting case in point is K’s Ch. 9, ‘On the origins of morphophonemics in American linguistics’,
which, among other things, traces the concept of ordered rules. One of K’s goals is to
determine to what extent Chomsky’s 1951 M.A. thesis and then his subsequent work was—or
was not—influenced by Bloomfield’s ten-page ‘Menomini morphophonemics’, which appeared
in Travaux du cercle linguistique de Prague 8 in 1939. The story crucially involves Chomsky’s
supervisor Zellig Harris, whose Methods in structural linguistics (1951), which had been circulating
in manuscript form since 1946, contains a section entitled ‘Morphophonemics’. That
Chomsky knew of Harris’s Methods before 1951 is clear, since K notes at the outset that Harris
thanks Chomsky in his preface for helping with the proofs (210). K’s story may start there (case
closed: even if Chomsky never read Bloomfield’s paper, he would have absorbed the essentials of
Bloomfield’s ideas about rule ordering through Harris’s work), but it does not end there.
K’s main goal in Ch. 9 is to unravel what he calls the counter-history that has been woven over
the decades about Chomsky’s supposed originality with respect to rule ordering, and which includes
Chomsky’s repeated assertions about his ignorance of Bloomfield’s article. For instance:
‘It is rather astonishing’, K quotes Chomsky as saying in a letter to Frederick Newmeyer in 1988,
‘that no one at Penn suggested to me that I look at the Bloomfield article’ (241). Another instance:
a pair of Chomsky’s supporters writing in 1989 claim that Bloomfield’s ‘article was so unknown
in America that Chomsky tells us that he had not read “Menomini morphophonemics” until his
attention was drawn to it by Halle in the late 1950s’ (237; in a footnote K notes that the claim emanates
from Chomsky himself and does not appear to be based on the writers’ independent research).
K identifies the 9th International Congress of Linguistics held in Cambridge, MA, in
August 1962 as the decisive event, ‘ably prepared and effectively run’ by Morris Halle, where the
strategy had become ‘to sell Chomsky’s ideas as having little to do with the linguistics of his
American teachers and predecessors … [such that] … connections with the work of Chomsky’s
immediate predecessors had to be minimized, if not erased’ (234). It was after this event that the
story of the noncumulative, that is, so-called revolutionary, nature of generative linguistics took
shape and took hold and has now been reproduced in textbooks and historical accounts to such an
extent that ‘this concoction has become accepted as historical fact by many followers’ (235). The
way K sees it, by contrast, American linguistics during the 1940s and 1950s involved more evolution
than revolution. His point, however, is not to chastize Chomsky—or anyone else—for distorting
the historical record. In fact, he goes so far as to say that ‘it appears to me that Chomsky
is at least doing what most of us do, and more often than not unconsciously, namely to reinterpret
our own past as we grow older, while at the same time our memory of this past has become much
less reliable than we may believe it to be’ (244). This is the point of K’s historiography: to let the
record speak for itself rather than any one individual (or group of individuals) at any particular
stage in a career or a theoretical moment, so that the reader may draw his own conclusions. One
of the conclusions I draw from this episode is that Chomsky, in disavowing influences from immediate
predecessors, is making a bid for originality that supports the further formalist tenet that
utterances (and, by extension, entire theories) are unconditioned, in the behaviorist sense of the
term, by immediate circumstance.
This brings me to K’s longest and most thoughtful chapter, ‘The “Chomskyan revolution” and
its historiography’, which, due to the preceding discussion, is easy to summarize as involving
more evolution than revolution, depending on how one defines ‘revolution’. That there was a
rhetorical revolution is not in doubt. But K puts in great doubt whether there was one in the
Kuhnian sense of incommensurability of theoretical views about language, despite Chomsky’s
repeated claims that he was not understood by his older colleagues during the 1950s (187). Given
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the vantage point of 2010, it does not seem particularly fruitful to me to wonder, as James Mc-
Cawley did several decades ago already, whether, if indeed there was a paradigm shift in the
Kuhnian sense, then it was with Aspects of the theory of syntax (1965) rather than with Syntactic
structures (1957) (see p. 190). Rather, it seems better now to historicize Kuhn, whose The structure
of scientific revolutions (1962) was called a ‘sensationally successful book’ by Yakov
Malkiel in 1969 (157–58). Forty years later, these post-Chomskyan times now call for a different
historiographic model. Let me suggest Ludwik Fleck’s Genesis and development of a scientific
fact (1979), first published in German in 1935 and with a foreword by Thomas Kuhn in the En -
glish edition. Fleck’s understanding of the socially conditioned nature of cognition and his attention
to the microdynamics of a developing science—particularly one as heterogeneous and
interdisciplinary as linguistics has become—seems to me more of the moment than Kuhn; and
please do note the differences between Kuhn’s title and Fleck’s. Unlike Kuhn, Fleck does not invoke
radical discontinuities, so-called revolutions, in his accounts of intellectual history. Rather,
he writes: ‘it is altogether unwise to proclaim any such stylized viewpoint [e.g. generative grammar—
JTA], acknowledged and used to advantage by an entire thought collective as “truth or
error”. Some views advanced knowledge and gave satisfaction. These were overtaken not because
they were wrong but because thought develops’ (1979:64). So, thought developed from the
Bloomfieldians to the Chomskyans, and now it has developed well beyond the Chomskyans. I
think K would agree. And as we move on, it is good to know what we have moved on from. We
have K to thank for setting the record straight.
REFERENCES
BLOOMFIELD, LEONARD. 1933. Language. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
BLOOMFIELD, LEONARD. 1939. Menomini morphophonemics. Études phonologiques dédiées à la mémoire de
N. S. Trubetzkoy (Travaux du cercle linguistique de Prague 8), 105–15. Prague: Cercle Linguistique de
Prague.
CHOMSKY, NOAM. 1951. Morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
M.A. thesis. [Facsimile printing of original typescript, New York: Garland, 1979.]
CHOMSKY, NOAM. 1955/1956. The logical structure of linguistic theory. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. [Parts
revised during 1956.]
CHOMSKY, NOAM. 1957. Syntactic structures. Berlin: Mouton.
CHOMSKY, NOAM. 1963. Formal properties of grammars. Handbook of mathematical psychology, vol. 2, ed.
by R. Duncan Luce, Robert R. Bush, and Eugene Galanter, 323–418. New York: John Wiley & Sons.
CHOMSKY, NOAM. 1965. Aspects of the theory of syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
FLECK, LUDWIK. 1979. Genesis and development of a scientific fact. Foreword by Thomas Kuhn, trans. by
Fred Bradley and Thaddeus Trenn. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [Originally published as
Entstehung und Entwicklung einer wissenschaftlichen Tatsache: Einführung in die Lehre vom Denkstil
und Denkkollektiv, Basel: Benno Schwabe & Co., 1935.]
HARRIS, ZELLIG. 1951 [1947]. Methods of structural linguistics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
KUHN, THOMAS. 1962. The structure of scientific revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Program in Linguistics
Duke University
307 Allen Building
Box 90015
Durham, NC 27708
[jtetel@duke.edu]

(January, 2010).

Historiography's contribution to theoretical linguistics.

In Douglas Kibbee (Eds.),

Chomskyan Evolutions and Revolutions: Essays in Honor of E.F.K. Koerner

,

(pp. 443-469).

Amsterdam, The Netherlands:

John Benjamins.

Publication Description

Given the rich, multidisciplinary developments that have influenced linguistic theory and practice over the past fifty years, we historiographers are uniquely positioned to provide some much needed theoretical integration for the discipline in these post-Chomskyan times. We do so when we shift from practicing historiography as a subdiscipline to deploying it as a method of theoretical intervention. The goal of this essay is to sketch the results of a historiographically-informed critique of introductory linguistics textbooks — all of whose formats extend back to Leonard Bloomfield’s Language (1933) — and to offer the outline of a newer developmental linguistics which is: (a) reframed pragmatically by establishing from the beginning an embodied brain embedded in a context; and (b) organized not around the questions: What is language? or What do we know when we know a language? but rather around: How is it that hearing a sequence of sounds (or seeing a sequence of signs or reading a sequence of words) have the effects that they do? This conceptual shift entails addressing two new questions: How does a living being become a languaging living being? and How do we become the particular languaging living beings that we do? In order to answer these questions, both a phylogenetic script and an ontogenetic script need to be provided. Such an approach avoids the problem of the linguist who inherits a construct (e.g. Universal Grammar) and then must retrofit it to contemporary evolutionary and neurological research. It offers instead to our students — the future of the field — a theoretical account of our subject matter (language/languaging) whose evolutionary and neurological plausibility have been factored in from the beginning.